Boxes

Boxes, boxes, boxes. Isn't it funny how we pack up our lives in boxes; a year here, a year there, and at the end of your life you find yourself packed up, packed away, tucked in between the blankets and bicycles. He lifts the cover and runs his hands over the paper within, its yellowing smoothness slipping through his hands, like the past he is trying to hold onto, to remember. Faces with no names, names with no faces, people he can't even remember forgetting.

And then, her.

It isn't a good picture of her; she always hated her hair that day. But it's the only picture of her he has, the only one she ever let him take. In all the other pictures he has of her she is on the periphery, half seen and half invisible; a pair of eyes in the background; a ghost; a cipher. Perhaps that is why he still remembers her; how can you forget someone you never knew?

It's the look in her eyes that draws him to this picture, a look that has said everything and nothing to him at different times in his life. He remembers a time when he pulled it out and was filled with rage, with the urge to burn it, to wipe her out of his life as surely as she wiped him out of hers. But today he looks and sees only sadness. "Take my hand," she was saying, but he could not hear her then and can hardly hear her now, her voice echoing thin and tinny from a faded yellow photograph.